High Voltage noted that you'll need to have set up friend codes in order to chat with each other, but friends of friends will be able to chat as well in other words, if you have a friend in your lobby, and he has a friend in the lobby that you haven't friended yet, you can still chat with and hear him if you have WiiSpeak.
Our multiplayer session consisted of three different matches. In the first match we played The Conduit equivalent of Capture the Flag. But in this case, each team has an All Seeing Eye and the idea is to grab it and take it back to your base for points, all the while trying to stay alive. While you have the ASE you can't fire weapons and you emit a pulsing glow that lingers a trail in space, which can lead players to your location if they catch a glimpse of it. In our second match, we played The Conduit equivalent of "deathmatch" called Free-for-All where anyone and everyone is a target for 20 minutes.
The final game, Bounty Hunter, was a very unique mode with some interesting rules. In this option, it's everyone for themselves, but you'll only earn kills by taking down your defined target. Each person has a specific player as a target, noted by a yellow glow and a specific HUD call-out if you gun down anyone else, you'll lose points. The problem is, you might be the target for someone else in the arena, and you have no on-screen indication of who that might be
other than by assuming that the person trying to gun you down is your own personal Bounty Hunter. You can take down your Bounty Hunter with no penalty you don't get any points, but you won't have any taken away, either. Your target will shift to another player when your previous target gets gunned down.
When you do get gunned down in any mode, you'll respawn in ten seconds, during which time you'll have a spectator's perspective. You can change the viewpoint between players by tapping the A button, and you can pull up the game's rankings by holding the 1 button on the Wii remote. Incidentally, you can bring up rankings up as an overlay during the action, too. Unfortunately, it doesn't have ability to show your killer in a "Call of Duty" like three second rewind, an option I wished the game had as many times I had no idea where my murderer was.
Even though the systems were right next to each other, they each had to connect to a server outside the office through the internet so this demo was an accurate testbed for how the game will respond for connected systems in the same region. And for the most part the game played seamlessly. There were a couple bouts of millisecond lag delays between a player being shot and the game registering a kill, but overall the online experience was excellent.
I do have to mention that it was a bit detrimental for the demo to have so many systems together for a multiplayer session, as my Wii remote kept picking up other systems' infrared sensor bars and screwing with my aiming. It got bad enough in the demo that I had to pull aside one of the High Voltage guys to give them feedback on setting up the televisions to eliminate the IR pollution in future The Conduit multiplayer demos. I've played The Conduit in a more intimate setting so I know that the issues I was having were a Wii technical problem and not the fault of the game so keep that in mind if you read any hands-on that complains about "calibration issues" and "wonky control."
High Voltage has poured a lot of effort into creating customizable controls, offering an interface to remap buttons and tighten up the sensitivity. Any action can be assigned to any button on the Wii remote or nunchuk, and in Multiplayer mode you have access to one extra button (the + button, used for ASE in the single player campaign), so you can put higher used functions on one extra toggle.
Overall I was having a blast I'll freely admit that I'm nowhere near as good at first-person shooters as most people, and by the time everyone else was up to speed on the game's controls I was having my ass handed to me on a platter. And going by the reaction in the room it seems that The Conduit is a hit with the FPS fanatics. This is easily one of the Wii's best titles of the year, and definitely a shining moment for hardcore gamers with a Wii in their possession.
